Grabbing 4 Bins from the step in Auto

[Jared]

We've talked about a 4 bin grabber on our team, and we think that very competitive teams will have this ability. Being able to limit the opposing team to only 3 recycling containers while giving yourself as many as you could possibly use may prove to be extremely helpful.

Remember, the green container triples the value of the stack, and if your opponent has less than half the opportunities to triple one of their stack, they're not going to want to waste this sparse resource on a low stack. If you've got tons of containers, you can cap all your stacks. That said, you still need three very good robots to get to the point where any more than three green containers provides a huge benefit.

Personally, I expect to see a lot of container grabbing robots. A single green container adds 24 points to a 6 stack (or 21 to a 5 stack), which is worth more than a 20 point stacked toted set in autonomous mode. Even if your alliance only uses one out of the four containers, it can still be worth it!

By the time we get to championships, I don't think it's unreasonable to see a multi-container arm against a single container arm, or even two multi-container arms against each other. If robots are competitive enough, the fastest container grabber will be an extremely sought after robot.

If robots were extremely competitive, the game would be decided by the first second of autonomous mode, and the alliance that grabbed the containers first would win.